People are not broken; Do not try to fix them

It was 4 am. I was wide awake this morning. My wife had just come to bed. She has a much different sleeping routine than I, due to years working late nights. Soon she was sound asleep. But I was wide awake. Why? Because of some events and conversations I have recently had that were just eating away at my psyche and core being. These conversations had led me to keep mulling over in my mind a piece of wisdom that I have promoted during training and among friends for several years now:

"People are not broken; do not try to fix them"

This idea comes from the works of Marcus Buckingham. He wrote a number of insightful books including my favorite called First Break All The Rules. The works talk about how we have traditionally focused on people's skills (learned capabilities) rather than their inherent talents (innate capabilities). Because we focus on skills we miss the boat as it were. When someone fails to accomplish something we want them to accomplish we assume they are broken and try to fix them (which Buckingham reinforces through research is just not true). What both Buckingham and others (including W. Edwards Deming--the father of quality management) show is that it is the system that is broken not the person. If a person fails at a task it is because the task has not been identified correctly or a person's talents do not align to the task or most often the process for doing the task is poorly designed. So it is not people who are broken, rather the system of managing, leading and governing people that is broken. We need to fix the system, not the people.

I have been feeling this pressure put on me lately, especially at work. A lot of it comes down to trust. Do you trust those around you? Those you work with? Those you work for? Those who work for you? I had a boss in a previous life who kept telling me "Trust but verify". If you need to verify do you really, truly trust? Or do you play at trusting and do not believe that people are capable of extraordinary things? I try to trust those I encounter until they show me they cannot be trusted. Does this come with risk? Yes, but life is one BIG risk. If you live in fear and paranoia all the time you are not living a full and complete life. You are hampering yourself from growth, learning, experience and self-actualization (as Abraham Maslow called it in his famous Hierarchy of Needs).

The great people of history have things in common. One of them is that they recognized that avoiding risk would get them nowhere. Another element is trust. They trusted people, events and higher powers to see them through to their desired ends. Third they lived out the belief that "people are not broken; we do not need to fix them. The situation or condition is broken; We need to fix that instead."

I hope my own situation will resolve itself to a good end. I trust that it will.